In one of my works, I wrote that the Marines think all civilians are soft. The Marine at the end of the hall (full disclosure: my ex-workout partner) appeared at my door when he read that, glowering. I feared the wrath of Khan. Then he smiled; I relaxed. “Because they are!” he informed me with a big grin. Soft, that is.

He does not disdain civilians. Neither do I. After all, I am one. But both of us share the view that civilians are frequently, well, soft. That part seems true. What bothers me is that this frequently produces a view I see too much of, namely the conviction that civilians are morally inferior to the military. The trick is to acknowledge the first without concluding the second, which does not follow logically.

What does a civilian who works for the military like me mean by saying that civilians are soft? Turn it around: why do we praise someone in the military for being “lean and mean” or “hard”? (T-shirt seen in the gym: “Because I am hard you will not like me.”)

I think we do mean, first of all, physically hard. Hence the buzz produced by the upcoming movie “Annapolis” (stand by for this commentator's reaction; it's set here at USNA but wasn't filmed here). My students, especially the men, are ecstatic at the trailer. “Sir, it'll make us into such studs back at home!” It contains scenes of a screaming drill instructor-like USNA senior, pushups in the rain with the feet of the guy in front of you on your shoulders, boxing by ripped competitors with their shirts off, and lots of Hoo-rah calisthenics with rifles. (It also contains the amusing and portentous voice-over text: “Fifty Thousand Apply. Twelve Hundred Are Admitted.” Perhaps they meant 50,000 hits to the Academy's website, not applications.)

So the military at least aims at being physically hard, even when it doesn't achieve that goal. Physical toughness matters in the military, self-evidently so in combat units like Marine infantry or Navy SEALs or Army Rangers. It matters for everybody else too: it helps your command presence, shows you have the discipline to get out there and go the extra mile. (See an earlier column.)

And that brings us to another sense of hard the military is rightly proud of. Big guns and/or being able to run for long distances with a pack on your back gets you points in the military for sheer physical power. But these things show that you can push through the pain, discouragement, and downright boredom that stops ordinary people from rising to this level. Most civilians I know stop running or lifting when they little winded or start to sweat. And that's the ones who go to the gym rather than reaching for the clicker and the box of cold pizza. The military, by contrast, learns to love pain as “weakness leaving the body” (another gym T-shirt; I love these things).

The military is proud of the fact that it sometimes works on very little sleep and begins its day while those soft civilians are still snoozing in their beds. For a while an Army recruiting slogan was “we do more things before 8 a.m. than most people do all day.” Theoretically that would be possible for civilians too, only civilians understandably re-set the alarm and turn over.

Of course, not all civilians stay in bed all morning. (Sleep-deprived mothers up in the middle of the night with colicky babies probably want to shoot me by now.) Nobody is saying that all civilians are lazy and have paunches, can't take pain, or always take the easy way out, only that this is true of a greater proportion of civilians than it is of military members. However the generalization, though not without exceptions, is well founded. Certainly a trip to the local mall is painful for many people in the military, perhaps especially at this holiday season. Temples of consumption patronized by overweight people who recover from a grueling morning of shopping by scarfing down a Cinnabon or two.

It makes you wonder. Or at least it makes me wonder. What are those in the military doing it for? One of my students said he had to eat the fact he was in the military to defend the right of some guy in San Francisco to wear a dress. Or the right of all those overstuffed people with maxed-out credit cards and too much junk already back home to go to the mall, stuff some more, max out yet another card, and acquire another gadget or three.

Is this as good as it gets? What is all this self-sacrifice for? To protect a society that seems to be based on greed and self-indulgence, a society based on softness rather than the military virtues of hardness?

Even our politicians can't get a handle on this. The Enemy, which right now would be militant Islam, sees us as soft and bloated, the way the Marines do (assuming my workout buddy is typical in his attitudes). Even our allies see us a greedy bullies who live soft and use up twice the energy per person of any other Western country. For a while the civilian commander-in-chief lost no opportunity to put on a flyboy's jacket and have photo-ops with the military. Yet after 9/11 we were famously told to get shopping.

How can the military be proud of its hardness without falling into the abyss of wondering why they bother? At this New Year, the military has to know what they're sacrificing for, and why they bother.

Consider it this way. The military is a pure laboratory version of qualities that exist in pockets or in more diluted forms outside. That's the positive way to spin it. But this comes as a price. As a result of this greater intensity of these particular virtues, it excludes many other virtues -- such as, for starters, maternal caring virtues, or compassion for the weak. The civilian world is an unorganized garden of many plants: the military takes the ones that will grow in its conditions, and gives them the conditions to flourish.

In this New Year's season, take pride in what you do. But be understanding of the people you're doing it for. By definition, they're going to be different. And Happy New Year -- especially if you're in uniform overseas.